How Does Lifelock Work And How Can They Protect You

Over the past few months I’ve covered several different articles about Lifelock from a complete review, to whether it was worth it, to a complete cost breakdown and how to get it cheaper. However, in this article I’m going to cover another big concerning question about the product and that is How Does Lifelock Work?

One of the big misconceptions with this product is that it is no better than your average and ordinary credit monitoring service when in fact they are very different from each other.

To understand this better I’m going to show you exactly how Lifelock works and how it differs from your normal credit monitoring services.

How Does Lifelock Work

Register and Complete Your Profile. When you sign up for Lifelock Ultimate the first thing you need to do is complete a profile. Your profile is everything they will need to monitor and protect you from identity theft. Below is a list of all the things you need to add to your profile.

Credit Cards

Drivers License

Insurance Card

Bank Accounts

Home Address

Email Address

Phone Numbers

Maiden Name

Monitor For Alerts. Once you’ve completed your profile Lifelock will monitor all of these areas for any changes or suspicious activity. They do this by monitoring several databases with your given profile to see if anyone is misusing your information.

Here are several things that Lifelock monitors when it comes to your identity.

Checking and Savings. If anyone tries to open a new savings account in your name and you will be notified immediately.

Account Takeovers. If someone tries to change the name on one of your accounts you will be notified. You wouldn’t believe how easy this if for people to do.

Apply For Credit. If someone tries to apply for credit under your name you will receive an alert automatically.

Name & Address. If someone messes with your name and address or applies your name to an account but puts a different address down you will be notified.

Court Records. If someone happens to tamper with court records to have you falsly accused of a crime you didn’t commit it will alert you.

Online Networks. Lifelock will also monitor your online presence as well to see if people are misusing your personal information.

Payday Loans. Finally, another area they monitor is Payday Loans. These can be some of the easiest loans for criminals to get and Lifelock will alert you if someone has used your information.

Alerts. From here once Lifelock notices any sort of weird activity they will notify you by email, phone, or even text if you prefer and in most cases they will use all 3 if they have to.

Once you receive an alert you need to notify Lifelock immediately whether this is a threat or not. For example, when I recently moved from my rental house to my new house I received an alert that my address had changed. In this case nothing was wrong but if their had been I would have notified Lifelock immediately.

Lifelock Versus Credit Monitoring

Now that we have a basic understanding of how Lifelock works I want to point out some big differences between this program and credit monitoring. To start I actually signed up for a free credit monitoring service through Credit Karma, and the differences between the two programs were huge.

First off, Credit Karma sent me only one notification for as long as I’ve had it. With Lifelock I received tons of alerts from credit applications, to sexual predator notifications, to address changes.

Plus to boot they also show you your credit score, credit reports, inform you of any sexual predators in your area and even order you new credit cards and insurance card if your wallet happen to get stolen.

When it comes down to it credit monitoring services are only looking at your credit report, while Lifelock is looking at the entire profile.

How It’s Working So Far

To date I’ve received a total of 8 alerts so far and it’s working great. Luckily, none of them have been serious so far, however the latest statistics show that almost everyone will experience an identity theft some point in their lives.